


Ice and Fire

by Eristastic



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Gentleness, Ice Play, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-17
Updated: 2016-10-17
Packaged: 2018-08-23 01:52:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,361
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8309236
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eristastic/pseuds/Eristastic
Summary: Yuuri didn’t feel like himself, but there was nothing wrong with that. Nothing wrong at all with feeling like you could fly, or do three quads in a row.

 Was this what people meant when they said they came alive? 
 
A gentle kind of breaking-out-of-one's-shell story that also involves mild ice play.





	

**Author's Note:**

> I got a sort-of request for this, and hey, I might as well.
> 
> (Sorry it's probably not as explicit as 'yuri on ice-play' suggests) (but if there aren't already 100 more explicit ice-play fics in the tag, what are we even doing with our time here)

Yuuri, personally, wouldn’t have called himself adventurous. What with the figure skating and competitions, he was well aware that lots of people _would_ , but skating had just become another part of his life, so it didn’t really register anymore. Adventure felt like it came in a different flavour.

There were things he didn’t think he’d ever experience, which was fine, really – lots of people never experienced things – but it did leave him feeling a little empty sometimes. Like when he remembered he was over twenty and had never gone for trips with just his friends (competitions didn’t even come close to counting), had never really let loose and got drunk (he’d had reason enough, but he’d never felt the need), or had never had that sparkling youthful love everyone liked to talk about. His one and only crush didn’t count. Definitely.

It wasn’t something he dwelled on a lot, because he liked to think he was quite a busy person. There was training to do and...training to do. Lots of things. It was just sometimes, when he saw couples on TV touching and laughing: he’d feel a little out of it, a little wistful with the idea that there were things he couldn’t quite reach.

Victor had had a decidedly destructive effect on that conviction.

It wasn’t just the physical closeness (although it was also that): it was everything. With bright eyes and a voice full of excitement, Victor speared him through and lit him up; it was like the feeling he got when he watched Victor skate, but all the time. Yuuri felt inspired, if this was what inspiration was. He felt like he could _do_ things, like doors were finally opening to him, which was stupid, because they’d always been open, he just hadn’t seen, somehow.

It was like being swept along, taken by the hand and spun out of his comfort zone; exhilarating, he supposed he’d call it, and that included the physical closeness.

 

“Let’s do it, Yuuri!” Victor said happily, leaning over the low table so he was right up in Yuuri’s face. Just a little too close, the room just a little too small, but that had started to become normal, so it was okay. Victor’s hair looked so fine, so soft from this distance.

“I…I don’t think that would count as training,” Yuuri said, looking away. He could still feel Victor’s eyes on him, and he had to look back, just in time to catch the dazzling smile waiting for him.

Mercifully, Victor sat back on his heels so they weren’t quite so close. “I’m your coach, Yuuri: if I say it’s training, then it’s training.”

“Well yes, I guess that makes sense in _theory_ , but I still don’t think it’s training.”

Victor looked…not put out, but disappointed, perhaps. Deflated: that was the word. Yuuri tried not to let it get to him, but there wasn’t much else to concentrate on. Was it just him or was the light lower than usual? It wasn’t that late, but even the muffled noises from around the rest of the inn sounded too quiet. Just the two of them, in this too-dark, too-small room with a low table in between them. Why was he so flustered? It’d have made more sense to just drown in happiness. And yet.

Nerves were like that, he supposed. Pity, though.

“Yuuri,” Victor said, elongating the sound like he was telling him off, but not quite. A little too playful for that. “You should trust me on this one. It’ll help us grow closer, and isn’t that important? Don’t you think it’s better if we’re perfectly in tune?”

“So you admit it’s not actually training?”

“...It’s a kind of training.”

“It is _not_ ,” Yuuri laughed, more out of embarrassment than anything else. “It sounds like a kind of torture technique.”

“They’re just ice cubes,” Victor frowned in a not-pout, propping his head up with the back of a hand and swirling round the dregs of his drink with the other. “I don’t think it’d be torturous at all. In fact, I think you’d like it. What’s the problem, anyway? It’ll be a good bonding exercise, it’ll bring us together, and you know I want to know everything about you.”

Yuuri stared down at the table, his hands gripping his cup. Did Victor have to say things like that? Any more and Yuuri was going to melt with happiness. He could feel a smile growing on his face already, pushing up through the inevitable blush, and his taut knuckles were trembling. Hopefully Victor wouldn’t notice, but he wouldn’t have put money on it.

“I don’t really get how it’ll help…” he managed to mumble, counting it a personal success that he got any words out at all.

“But I just explained it! And anyway, isn’t it enough that I want to do it?”

“So you’re really just doing it because you want to!” Yuuri lifted a finger in accusation, still smiling. He looked like an idiot, he just knew it – even his glasses were crooked on his nose – but far from laughing, Victor only smiled again, warmly. So warm that it was like Yuuri couldn’t look away, and now he saw the sense in shutting the rest of the world out of this one small room. Perhaps it had been on purpose after all.

“Is that a problem?” Victor asked, tilting his head so his hair swept over his face. He reached a hand over to gently tease Yuuri’s fingers open and fit his own in between. He already knew it wasn’t a problem, of course, or he wouldn’t be smiling like that. And Yuuri, he… He didn’t feel like himself, but he didn’t think there was anything wrong with that. Nothing wrong at all with feeling like you could fly, or do three quads in a row.

Was this what people meant when they said they came alive?

Whatever it was, it kept him smiling all through the time it took to go through the darkened halls and fetch a tray of ice cubes from the kitchen, walking back to the room as quietly as he could. It was only when Victor clapped happily on his return that he started to realise that something was a little off with the whole situation, but he put the tray down, slid the door shut, and knelt down anyway.

“Excellent!” Victor said, in English – and wasn’t it strange how he did that? He rarely said anything in Russian, but–

“ _Eeee!_ ” Yuuri’s thoughts were brought to an abrupt, screeching stop when Victor leant over the table to hold an ice cube to his nape. The ice cube fell to the ground and Yuuri clutched his skin, staring at Victor in a way he hoped wasn’t too scandalised. “Why did you do that?”

“That’s how this works,” Victor said cheerfully. “Do you mind if I take a picture, by the way?”

“Of course I mind!”

“Just of the ice cubes, I mean.”

“What’s the point in that?” Yuuri let his hands drop, sitting down a little more comfortably as Victor got his phone out, absent-mindedly stroking the furry, dozing carpet in the corner that was, if you looked close enough, a dog.

Victor didn’t answer until he’d taken a picture, frowned at it, deleted it, taken another, cropped it, added a filter, and uploaded it on Instagram. Then he winked. “It’s all in the mystery, Yuuri!”

Of course it was. Another small, helpless smile worked its way to his lips, quickly covered up when he asked, “And you’re sure you want to do this?”

“Naturally, I am.” As good as his word, Victor got up (gracefully, because everything he did was graceful) and knelt behind Yuuri. Everything went tense, or perhaps that was just because Yuuri found himself sitting bolt upright, hands on his knees, staring at the opposite wall.

“Relax!” Victor laughed. “Or don’t: this will help you either way. Ice massages, you know.”

“Are those real? Did you just make that up?”

Victor didn’t answer, which was as good an answer as any. Instead, he reached over for the tray of already-melting ice cubes and Yuuri felt that his heart might explode, just a little. He had to force himself to breathe properly, but all that effort went to waste when he felt the shocking cold of ice on the back of his neck. It rested there for a moment before sliding down to the neckline of his shirt, just cresting the top of his spine. And then it was gone, with only a thin, slick layer of water and cold to tell him he hadn’t been imagining it.

Chilling, really.

“Will you take your shirt off?”

“I’m sorry, _what?_ ” he choked out, a squawk in comparison to Victor’s syrup-smooth voice from behind him.

“You don’t have to, but do you want to get it wet?”

A sound argument. And he wasn’t himself, and it was just them, and none of it felt quite real. Yuuri took his shirt off, arms shaking. He had to clench his hands into fists on his thighs afterwards, desperately trying to calm down. There was another ice cube: a freezing line tracing down his spine, curving round each of his shoulder blades and down to the small of his back. Chilled drops trickled down his skin every so often, with how slowly Victor was taking it. Yuuri’s hands were flushed (his cheeks were too, and his neck, he knew) and the contrast in heat was like an electric shock, but drawn out into something resembling pleasure. It was only when the ice cube was taken away that Yuuri realised he’d been holding his breath.

Before he could catch it again, Victor pressed another ice cube to his skin, this time running it down his arm. Gentle, firm fingers reached around to pick his hand up and stretch his arm to the side, sliding the ice along his bare skin all the way to the wrist. It was held there just long enough for Yuuri to wonder if they were working up to something (although he was already so lost that he had no idea what this could possibly be working up to), but then Victor took the ice away again and he could let his arm drop to his side.

“We should have used a blindfold,” Victor said thoughtfully.

“I…I’m not in favour of that.”

“Why not? It would have heightened your senses, you know.” His voice was so calm – it was nice for some.

“Are you even trying to pretend this is about training anymore?”

“Do you mind?”

“That’s not really an answer…”

It wasn’t, but it was enough to sink them back into silence. To his surprise, Yuuri had reached some kind of calm. There was something nice about shivering as another ice cube circled around his back: with only the low hum of the single light above them and the distant beeping of cars, it was special, private. Or was it weird to be thinking that? It was weird, wasn’t it? But there wasn’t any way he could explain away what they were doing otherwise: it was just private.

It felt special, and it didn’t even matter if there was some small voice telling him he didn’t belong here, in this room, with this man, being treated like a lover.

Victor picked up his other arm and began to ‘massage’ it like the first. Again, he paused at the wrist, his own hand sliding up to entwine his fingers with Yuuri’s. Again, Yuuri waited, feeling less and less like himself by the second. Victor squeezed his hand, and then Yuuri felt something that definitely wasn’t ice touch the back of his neck and linger there. Warmth.

He laughed nervously, blood pounding in his ears. “Was that…?”

“Was that what?” Smooth as ever.

He laughed again, but it felt forced even to him. “You’re not going to tell me that it’s normal for friends to kiss overseas, right? I _have_ been out of the country: I know-”

“I wasn’t going to say that. This isn’t something I’d ever do with just a friend.” The ice fell to the floor; fingers ran up through Yuuri’s hair softly. He thought his skin might be on fire. Without being asked or prompted, he pulled his hand back and turned around (clumsily, awkwardly) so they could look at each other. It was a mistake, of course: he was him, and Victor was the sun.

It was quite possibly the sappiest and truest thing he’d ever thought.

“Yuuri,” Victor said, as if he just wanted an excuse to say Yuuri’s name, and brought a hand up to the side of his jaw. “Have you had enough?”

“Have you?”

Victor tilted his head in a question, but that only served to bring their faces closer together. It was on purpose, Yuuri decided. He soldiered on, regardless of how Victor’s thumbs were tracing circles on his cheeks, fingers just brushing through his hair.

“You said…you said you wanted to do this because you wanted to know, uh…everything about me.” His already quiet whisper trailed off into nothing.

“I did.”

“So, have you…have you…”

“But I think there’s a lot I have yet to learn about you,” Victor murmured as if Yuuri hadn’t said anything, and moved his hand so he was tilting Yuuri’s chin up with the barest touch of his fingertips. “The question is really, do you mind?”

Mind? Was he supposed to mind this? Everything was so warm, like he was wrapped in fur, and all he could see were those eyes looking back at him. Completely without expectations: only confidence.

“I…I don’t mind,” he managed to say. “I want…to try new things, and be better than I am, and you make me want to. I don’t think I could ever mind, if it’s you.”

“Yuuri!” Victor exclaimed softly, his smile widening even as he moved closer. “That’s exactly what I like.”

If having Victor smile at him was like being bathed in sunlight, Yuuri had no suitable comparisons for being kissed by him.


End file.
